Maintenance of aviation equipment is a significant expense for any aircraft owner, and is a primary concern for safety of the aircraft. While an automobile that experiences mechanical trouble such as an engine problem can usually pull the vehicle over and wait for repairs to be made, a similar engine failure in an aircraft flying at tens of thousands of feet can be more troublesome. For this reason, regular maintenance and service of aviation engines and other such aircraft systems is mandated by federal agencies, and is performed regularly to ensure the reliable operation of the airplane.
Because the equipment, parts, and labor involved with aircraft maintenance are all relatively expensive, aircraft operators desire to minimize the cost involved while ensuring that their aircraft remain safe and reliable. Because it is difficult and potentially unsafe to try to cut costs on parts or on maintenance equipment, some of this effort in controlling cost is directed toward reducing labor by keeping fault diagnosis and related maintenance operation costs to a minimum. This can be achieved by good engineering of the aircraft and its systems, and by good training or extensive experience for the maintenance personnel servicing the aircraft. Fast and efficient diagnosing of a problem results in a decrease in time and labor spent fixing a given problem, and results in a reduction of resource consumption such as service hangar time and loss of the aircraft for normal flight operations.
The maintenance personnel typically generate what are known as field service reports, or FSRs, to document their service work in diagnosing and repairing an aircraft fault. The field service report typically comprises an unstructured written narrative that describes the symptoms observed that indicated service was necessary, the actions taken in diagnosing and repairing the aircraft, the parts and equipment used, and the eventual solution to the fault. This information serves as a record of what has happened, and as an indicator of what may work to solve problems having certain symptoms or that are diagnosed based on certain observations or problems.
It is therefore desired to more effectively use aviation field service report data to make service of aircraft more efficient and cost-effective.